Dead Heat

by Patricia Briggs

  She didn’t say it out loud, but his eyes flicked to her and then away, so she thought he might have caught her thought through the mating bond that sometimes startled her with its usefulness. Hard to keep secrets from your mate, harder to stay angry when you can feel the other person’s pain … and love. Their bond seemed to communicate their emotions better than words. But it sometimes slid the words in, too.

  “Yes,” he said. “Until I met you, he was my best friend. I haven’t seen him for twenty years because the last time I was there, I suddenly realized that he was getting old. He is human, not werewolf.” He stared out at the blue sky. “I didn’t stay away on purpose, Anna. Not on purpose. But visiting him wasn’t a … good thing anymore. I counted on him keeping me … level. What you do for me now, when Da’s assignments are bad.” He let out a shaky breath. “I don’t say good-bye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily. Good-bye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.”

  She put her hand on his thigh and left it there until the plane touched down.

  Chelsea’s headache redoubled on the way home, and after a few sharp interchanges the children fell silent. She craved home in a way that she hadn’t since she was ten years old, returning from a very long, very bad summer camp.

  When she turned the car into the driveway, there was no magical surcease from pain. She got the kids out of the car and into the house. She should have … done something with them, but she worried that in her current state she might hurt their feelings … or worse.

  She left them to their own devices while she stumbled through her bedroom to the bathroom beyond. If she could just get rid of this headache, she could regain her balance.

  She took three painkillers when the directions told her to take two. The pills were dry and stuck in her throat; she took two more and then put her mouth to the faucet and drank water to get them down.

  Too many, she thought, but her head really hurt. She felt like she should take more. Her hand went up to the medicine cabinet where there were some leftover painkillers from when she’d had a root canal done a few months earlier. She hit the glass toothbrush holder, and it fell into the sink and shattered.

  She cleaned it up, but her headache made her clumsy. She sliced her finger on a shard she was throwing away. It wasn’t a bad cut. She stuck the finger in her mouth and stared at herself in the mirror over her sink. She looked … wrong. She put her hands to her face and pulled the skin back, flattening her nose a little, but it didn’t change the stranger in the mirror where she was supposed to be.

  She washed her face in cold water, and that seemed to help the headache a little. Her finger had quit bleeding.

  A glance at the clock showed her it was nearly time for Max to be home. More than ten years older than his half brother and sister, he had … what sport was it? Basketball. He had basketball practice after school.

  And if he was almost home, she’d been in the bathroom an hour, left a four-year-old and a five-year-old without supervision for an hour. She hurried out and down the stairs. The sound of the TV led her to the family room, where the kids were watching a cartoon. Michael didn’t look up, but Mackie gave her a wary look.

  “Sorry,” she told them. “I have a bad headache. Will you two be okay for a while more? I have to get dinner started.”

  “Okie-dokie,” said Michael, without looking away from the TV.

  Because he couldn’t be bothered. TV was more important than his mother.

  Mackie didn’t say anything. Just watching her with her father’s eyes and judging what she saw, always judging her and finding her lacking.

  Chelsea turned and went to the kitchen. She got random things out of the refrigerator with shaking hands: carrots, celery, summer sausage, and radishes. The cutting board hadn’t been put back where it belonged and she had to search for it. She found it among the pots and pans instead of in the narrow cupboard next to the stove, and by then she was in a fine rage.

  Max came in the kitchen door, letting it bang carelessly against the wall. He took after her, tall and blond, rather than her first husband, who’d died in a car wreck, leaving her to raise her two-year-old son on her own. For a moment Max’s presence cleared her head like a breath of fresh air.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said cheerily, sounding so much like his father that it sometimes made her heart ache. She loved Kage, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t loved Rob, too. “What’s for dinner?”

  He was always hungry these days. Always expecting her to feed him when he was old enough to get his own food. She clenched her fingers around the chef’s knife, so cool and powerful in her hand.

  “Would you do something for me?” she said through gritted teeth, unable to look away from the bright silver promise of the knife.

  “Sure,” Max said, snitching a carrot from the bag she’d put on the counter.

  Bad manners to steal food before the cook was ready. Bad.

  Anna blocked the tires while Charles finished tying down the plane to the anchors he’d driven into the ground. The plane wasn’t that small, but it was designed to fly. That meant that a strong wind would move it unless it was tied down. They’d done this enough times now that Charles didn’t have to tell her what to do or how.

  A battered truck charged up the dirt road in a cloud of dust and stopped next to their airplane without slowing much in between. The driver was young, Native American, and dressed in a cross between cowboy and First People: jeans, boots, cowboy hat, T-shirt, turquoise necklace, earrings. He held up his pants with a leather belt decked with silver and turquoise.

  Young meant that he was not the man she and Charles were coming to see.

  Charles didn’t look up from his task as the stranger rounded the end of his truck and walked toward them, his steps rapid and businesslike. If this man had been a stranger, Charles would have looked up.

  The expression on the approaching man’s face was a bit grim, as if he was engaged in a necessary but not enjoyable task. He watched Charles until he came within easy talking distance and then glanced, almost absently, at Anna. He staggered, rocked back on his worn boot heels, and let out a gasp of air like a man hit in the stomach.

  He was a werewolf, Anna divined more from his actions than from his scent, as he was downwind. A dominant werewolf, if his reaction was anything to judge by. Less-dominant wolves tended not to react so strongly to her presence.

  Omega werewolves were rare as hens’ teeth. Anna knew of one other Omega wolf in Europe. As far as she knew, they were it. Bran said it was because there weren’t many werewolves crazy enough to attack and so Change a person who had the qualities of an Omega. Samuel, Charles’s brother, called her “Valium for werewolves.”

  Charles, satisfied the plane would be there waiting for them when they came back, looked at the stranger and raised his eyebrows. She knew he was amused at the other man’s reaction to her, but she didn’t think that the stranger would notice—most people didn’t. A lot of Charles’s expressions were more … micro-expressions, especially when he was in public.

  “Hosteen,” Charles said, “this is my mate and wife, Anna. Anna, this is Hosteen Sani, full-blooded Navajo, Alpha of the Salt River Pack, and breeder of fine Arabian horses for the past three-quarters of a century, give or take a decade.”

  Sani meant that he was related to Charles’s Joseph. Anna was going to sit her husband down as soon as she got him in private again and make him talk.

  “Good to meet you,” Anna said.

  Hosteen inclined his head but didn’t say anything, just stared at her while Charles tossed their bags into the back of the truck. Her mate didn’t seem to be worried about Hosteen’s lack of response, no matter how awkward. He opened the passenger door in open invitation for Anna to sit in the middle.

  Anna got in and watched as Hosteen walked thoughtfully around the front of the truck with no sign of the get-things-done stride he’d had before he met her. He opened the driver’s-side door as Charles got in besid
e her, but then Hosteen stood in the shelter of the door as if he were reluctant to sit next to her.

  “Navajo?” Anna asked, trying to make things easier on him with a little conversation. “I thought the Navajo in Arizona mostly live north of Flagstaff.”

  Hosteen narrowed his eyes until she thought she’d said something wrong. Then he muttered something in a foreign language that she didn’t quite catch, nodded to himself, and hopped into the driver’s seat.

  He didn’t say anything more until they were headed down the bumpy, unpaved road.

  “Yes,” he said. “Most Navajo live in the north, in the Four Corners region. There are a few Navajo here, because there is work here, but you are right, mostly it is Pima, O’odham, Maricopa, with a dash of Apache or Kwtsaan to liven the mix.”

  She read the atmosphere in the truck as strained, but that might only be two dominant males in a small truck. Or more of Hosteen’s reaction to her. She honestly couldn’t tell whether Charles liked Hosteen or not. They certainly knew each other well; otherwise two dominant wolves would never have gotten into the same vehicle together.

  She decided to keep quiet and let them figure things out.

  After five minutes or so of silence, Hosteen gave a jerky nod as if in answer to some question only he heard. Then he put an end to any image of the laconic Native American; an image that Charles, for instance, could have been the poster boy for.

  “There is a long story to how I ended up here, away from the lands of the Diné, the Navajo,” he told her. “When I was Changed, a hundred years ago, more or less, I thought I must be a skinwalker. I had never heard of werewolves, you see, and neither had anyone I knew. You know what a skinwalker is?”

  Yes, but she’d learned that it was better to plead ignorance because sometimes what she thought she knew about the supernatural world was wrong or incomplete. “A little.”

  “Skinwalkers are evil witches who take on the shape of animals—usually it is animals—they skin. They delight in destruction, suffering, and pain. They spread illness and evil. I thought that was probably what I was—though I didn’t feel more evil than I had before I was attacked.” He smiled at her, inviting her to enjoy the joke on the young man he had been. She thought it was more horrific than funny—too close to her own experience.

  When she didn’t smile back, he regarded her thoughtfully, then turned his eyes back to the rough dirt track they were following.

  “I didn’t skin an animal for its shape. But even an ignorant boy such as I was could see that changing into a wolf, a monstrous wolf, gave me something in common with the witch people,” he said. He seemed to relax as he settled into the story, his voice drifting into a cadence that made her think that he had told this story more than once. “Those who follow the witchery way are evil, so I figured I must be, too. My parents loved me, but I was dangerous to them and to my family, so I left. This is where I ended up.”

  “California is where you went first,” said Charles, and the way he said it made Anna think that he was encouraging the other man to tell stories. “Hosteen is a movie star, Anna.”

  Hosteen smiled—and it changed his whole demeanor. Anna saw that she had been wrong when she’d thought he was a little grim. There was delight and innocence in that smile.

  “You’ll see my face in a few movies,” he conceded almost shyly. “But only if you like the old silent movies. No real parts, just Apache number two, Hopi number eight, that sort of thing. When they found out I was good with horses, I moved pretty quickly into horse wrangling. Worked on The Son of the Sheik.”

  And Anna realized that Charles had prodded Hosteen because he knew that she’d enjoy this story.

  Charles kept telling her that just because a wolf was old didn’t mean that he’d ever met a famous person from the past. She and her brother had spent a lot of Saturday afternoons eating popcorn and watching movies with her father. He liked either very old black-and-white movies, though usually with sound tracks, or kung fu theater.

  One afternoon, her father had rented a whole bunch of Valentino films and they’d watched them, one after another. The finale had been The Son of the Sheik.

  “Rudolph Valentino’s last film?” Anna asked.

  “Yes,” Hosteen said. “I wrangled horses for a few of his movies. Valentino was a horseman. He was famous, but he didn’t mind stopping to talk to the Indian who was handling the horses. I liked him.”

  Hosteen had answered her question, but he kept talking. Either he sensed her continued interest, or he liked to tell stories. Maybe a bit of both.

  “They brought in a small herd of Arabian horses for the movie. Rented them from Kellogg, the guy who invented cornflakes.” Hosteen laughed to himself as if something about the deal amused him. “Anyway, they brought in a number of Arabians—prettiest horses I’d ever seen. Valentino liked this big gray the best. But Valentino was too valuable and Jadaan, he could be unpredictable. The producers were worried Valentino would get tossed, so he mostly rode other horses for the film. Valentino was furious and insulted.” He pursed his lips. “They were idiots, those producers; Valentino could ride.”

  Hosteen fell silent, and Anna tried to think of a question to get him going again. Before she did, he said, “That Jadaan. He had terrible front legs. But he was as good as Valentino himself at striking a pose. Cameras loved him.”

  They bounced on over the rutted dirt road.

  “They brought in a stunt double to do the dangerous stuff,” Hosteen said after a while. “Carl Schmidt, he was a good horseman. Later, he changed his name to Raswan and wrote a lot of books about the Arabian. A good horseman, but a ridiculous person—like that singer who changed his name to a symbol instead of a word. Carl Raswan.” He snorted. “Raswan was a horse. Still, Carl was a good rider, did most of the shots with Jadaan and anything that required more speed than a canter. No one on the set, except perhaps Valentino because he was a nice guy, would have missed Carl if he’d broken his fool neck, so he was a good choice for a stunt double.”

  He laughed a little to himself again. “Now you see. Just ask me a question, any question, and it all comes back to horses. But you asked what I am doing here. I met Fowler and Annie McCormick, big money people, in California when they brought a couple of their horses to me to train. They had a place out here and were willing to guarantee me some work. I wanted to breed Arabians, and so I moved here. Bought a hundred acres next to their ranch and started my own operation.” He glanced at Charles. “About the time we first met, eh? Just before the Second World War.”

  “How’s Joseph?” Charles asked, in an apparent non sequitur, and Hosteen sobered.

  “Still human, and will apparently die that way. Eighty-two, stubborn as a mule.” Hosteen looked at Anna and then the road. “I wish you would change his mind about that.”

  “I’ve offered before,” Charles said.

  “Yes,” said Hosteen. “I know.” He kept his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe you could do more than offer.”

  The atmosphere in the truck chilled to below zero, even though, Anna was pretty sure, it was close to seventy degrees outside.

  “No,” said Charles.

  “You go see him,” said Hosteen with a sudden growl in his voice. “You go see my son, that bright spirit who is trapped in a body that is dying around him. You see him—and then you look me in the eye and tell me that again.”

  “Hosteen,” said Charles carefully. “If Joseph had at any time in the last twenty years changed his stance on the matter, he would have asked you or me. I will not, and you will not, force him. A wolf who Changes an unwilling victim must himself die, by the Marrok’s word.”

  “Your father would not kill you for it,” said Hosteen, but the fire of his anger was gone. “He would kill me—have you kill me—but you he would spare.”

  “If you think that,” Charles said, “then you don’t know my father very well.”

  Chelsea tried not to look at the blood when she called her husband.

  �
�Kage, Kage, Kage,” she chanted in time with the rings.

  “This is Kage Sani,” his voice said in her ear, and she could have cried. “I can’t answer right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

  “The children,” she said. “Kage. The children.” She wanted to tell him about the children, but she screamed instead. When she caught her breath, and silence fell, she could only whisper, as if another loud noise might wake something evil. Again. “I was so angry, Kage. This knife. Blood. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry. Blood.” When Kage’s phone beeped to signal that it had stopped recording, she was still chanting into the mouthpiece.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The road switched from dirt to blacktop without warning. Anna couldn’t figure out why there was a paved driveway in the middle of nowhere, but then the house suddenly appeared.

  The lines of the house blended into the surrounding sand and various desert plants and backed into a small rocky formation too big to be a swell and not big enough to be a hill. Between shape and sandy color, the house seemed to grow out of the desert.

  Charles, seeing her surprise, said, “The Badlands of the Dakotas are like this, too. Things are hidden pretty easily out here. There’s a lot more relief to this land than your eyes tell you—that’s one of the reasons the landing strip is so far away. That’s where they had to go to find flat land without bringing in bulldozers.”

  “Lots of flat spaces in Scottsdale,” Hosteen said. “But out where we are the landscape is more interesting.”

  Hosteen pulled the truck into an empty slot in a line of covered parking spots designed to protect vehicles from the desert sun. A woman came out the nearest door to the house. She could have been anywhere between sixty and eighty, and she carried a broom in one hand.

  “Welcome to our home, Anna Cornick,” she said graciously. Her voice sounded like it should have belonged to a fifteen-year-old—soft and birdlike, without the quiver that age can bring. She pulled herself up straighter, raised her chin, and looked Charles in the eye, searching for something that she evidently found. Her voice grew husky. “Welcome home, Charles.”